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May I suggest a book to anybody that finds cephalopods interesting, especially given the connection with consciousness which is a recurring topic in these circl

May I suggest a book to anybody that finds cephalopods interesting, especially given the connection with consciousness which is a recurring topic in these circles: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi, just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that it's not a Latin word.

bananarchist 4y ago
No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)
- mc32 4y ago
  I always thought it was virus and virus given its root.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number. Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem. (Originally it would have been visos => visosa, but the final vowel in virus has become closed, while the intervocalic s has become r due to rhotacism.) You have been thinking at the masculine words whose stem ends in -u, like fructu (fruit), where the singular is fructus and the plural is fructuus. There -s is not part of the stem but it is a marker of the singular masculine nominative case. In virus and the other neuter nouns that end in -s, the -s is a part of the stem of the word, not a case marker. There are also masculine word where the stem ends in -s, like muus (mouse), in which the -s must also not be confused with the marker of the nominative case that is applied to some of the words with other kinds of stems.
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      > the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri, not viroris.
      - adrian_b 4y ago
        It is true that there are a few cases of a word "viri", which might have been the genitive of "virus". Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen. Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain seldom used words. Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum"). Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension. Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.
        DFHippie 4y ago
        That all makes sense. What I know of virus is all from books like Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, which is basically a 19th century understanding: languages have particular rules one can enumerate and deviations from these rules are errors.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        That understanding is basically correct. But the history of Latin is quite long, and the rules change over time.
- daveslash 4y ago
  It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish. I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    There’s no right way. Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
    - cnelsenmilt 4y ago
      Personally I've always preferred to muddy the waters by treating it as a fourth-declension noun, so that its plural would be octopūs.
    - cupofpython 4y ago
      so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold. so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive! Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is) Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
- DFHippie 4y ago
  Virus is the only neuter second declension Latin noun in -us (as opposed to -um). It means "poison" in Latin. I assume this was all meant tongue-in-cheek, but in case anyone is curious, the Latin plural is not virodes. All of this is recalled from my high school Latin, which was a long time ago.
- annyeonghada 4y ago
  In latin the word virus does not have an attested plural[1] but if we model it from the other neuter nouns of the second declension it would be "vira". [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 The plural of surplus is surpluses[2]. It would be *surplures/surplura in latin, so it is an English/French original. It doesn't make sense from an historical linguistic perspective to have a stem in dental "d" when in latin was in liquid "r": plus, pluris[3]. [2]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun [3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension Cactus is a masculine name from the second declension: its latin plural is "cactī"[4]. Again, it would be unexplainable how that stem in dental would appear in a second declension name (stem in "o"). [4]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin Octopus is right, given that it's a third declension name with a dental stem.[5] [5]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin
  - bananarchist 4y ago
    Your surplodes of evidence will never sway me and my linguistodes degree
    - euroderf 4y ago
      I tried to pursue this topic to the antipodes but I only found an antipus.
- cph123 4y ago
  I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    It’s 6th for me, and no adverts. How does this get monetised?
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      Something something pr0n
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        Paige, no!
  - ant6n 4y ago
    7th result on the first page? Sounds like an authoritative source to me!
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Google it a few more times, google will start feeding it back to people who will also google it in disbelief; two years from now they're using it in NYT headlines.
  - knaekhoved 4y ago
    Impressive indexing speed.
    - KMag 4y ago
      If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling. These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Either is fine. Octopuses or octopodes. The latter is the technical answer, but the former is acceptable and probably even more common. Although it is based on a Greek word, English isn’t Greek.
- staplung 4y ago
  The correct form is to sum up the legs involved. So two of the eight-legged creatures whose plural is in doubt would be hexadecapods. And if you have an octopus eating a kangaroo you'd then have a decapod, and so on.
- lalos 4y ago
  what is the plural for campus?
  - tokai 4y ago
    >The Latinate plural form campi is sometimes used, particularly with respect to colleges or universities; however, it is sometimes frowned upon. By contrast, the common plural form campuses is universally accepted. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology
- jl6 4y ago
  abacus->abacodes nautilus->nautilodes anus->anodes ?!
- barrenko 4y ago
  Isn't it virii (joke)?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Not so fast. "virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English. "surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". I admit that "superplodes" is pretty fun to say.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". What's irregular about that?
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Well, nothing technically, from what Latin I remember. I meant it in the not-technical sense that the nominative form is different from the word stem and it looks superficially like a standard 1st/2nd declension adjective.
- smeagull 4y ago
  Actually we're speaking English, and not Greek or Latin, so we add an 's' or 'es'. Just because some English professor assholes wanted to show off their knowledge of foreign languages in the 17-19th centuries, doesn't mean we should follow those rules now. They are responsible for a lot of the confusion and horrible English rules that users of English now have to deal with. I say shit on their horrible legacy.
dharmab 4y ago
If you want to get really pedantic, use Octopodes :)
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  > If you want to get really pedantic Well that certainly got our attention. Please, continue.
  - GravitasFailure 4y ago
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plurals-of-octopus-octopi-octopuses-octopodes https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura... The full thing is worth a read, but when you steal a word from one language that it also stole from a third, the pluralization rules are pretty much anything goes.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Octopoda is the order, better not mix both terms
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Is this a niche where I could use "octopodibus" ?
mc32 4y ago
English plural vs Latin vs Greek. Since its origin is Greek I’d take the anglicized plural or the original plural over the superimposed Latin plural which makes absolutely no sense to me.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  In ancient Greek πολύπους (polypus) is the more common and generic term, ὀκτάπους (octapus) the term for the animal, and ὀκτόπους (octopus) a possible synonym that seems to be used more often for the scorpion (which also has eight legs) or as an adjective for anything that is eight feet long or of eight square feet in size. Really, the English should be "octapus" or "polypus," and curmudgeons who want to feel superior to hoi illiterati polloi should cherish this treasure of pointless trivia.
stevenwoo 4y ago
some recent speculative sci-fi on same subject, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler set in near future Vietnam.
pacaro 4y ago
Or you can choose not to use the inflectional morphology of another language on a loanword. Especially in a case like octopus where it (arguably) isn't a loanword
LightG 4y ago
Octopussies, natch.
mike10921 4y ago
If someone at a party complained to me that octopuses is wrong and it should be octopi, I would most likely be moving on to the next table..
- space_ghost 4y ago
  And I would happily jump in your vacant seat and enjoy hours of pedantic discussions on the vagaries of silly English words.
  - dmichulke 4y ago
    Pro tip: invite him for for pizzae
    - flyingfences 4y ago
      Dialectically, "pizza" is an uncountable and "pie(s)" is the unit.
      - harshbutfair 4y ago
        In Australia we would never refer to pizzas as pies. Is this a US-only thing or does it happen elsewhere?
        OJFord 4y ago
        It's American to my British ear. I think they sometimes distinguish 'pizza pie' as being the deeper-pan Chicagoan style, which to be fair is a lot more like what I would call a pie than what I would call a pizza. (But also not really either.)
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        "Pies" is most certainly not American. I have heard that it is supposedly specific to New York, but if you watch Friends (set in New York), you'll see frequent references to the Joey Special, "two pizzas". It's always possible that there are zero people who think of "pies" as an appropriate way to refer to pizzas, but the myth persists that weird foreign people do it. People will believe anything about weird foreigners. Or there might be weird foreign people doing it right now. It's hard to know.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
The plural spelling is whatever plural people generally use. Why wouldn't it be?
pmb_ 4y ago
I'd have to give an anti-recommendation to this book. The author never explains his thesis and the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods. He spends very little time drawing connections to consciousness or speaking about what octopus life can tell us about consciousness. There is a whole chapter where he talks about the influence of language in human action (like self-talk), and then ends the chapter by with something like "and octopuses don't have this ability". What was the point of that whole chapter then? Maybe my expectations were miscalibrated, and I thought he would spend more time drawing connections between octopuses and humans, and what those similarities could tell us about consciousness. Instead of that, the writing about consciousness in this book is quite shallow.
- xcambar 4y ago
  Is there a book or resource you would recommend then?
  - pmb_ 4y ago
    If you're just curious about octopuses, I think you can probably learn much more in much less time by doing your own research and finding articles like this. If you're more interested in consciousness a good place to start is "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" by Annaka Harris.
- comboy 4y ago
  Same. I had huge expectations. Basically what you learn is that octopuses are intelligent and for a long time we didn't realize because they are smart enough to know they are in custody when we catch them and they're pretty social. I mean, it's OK, but the whole book feels a bit like a preface to the thing which never came.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods. That sounds like a recommendation to me!
kennend3 4y ago
The Octopus is my favourite animal (second is the Camel). For others who may find them interesting check out "My Octopus Teacher"
- thenoblesquid 4y ago
  Definitely checking that out. I've stopped eating Octopus. They are just on another level.
867-5309 4y ago
IIRC on QI they said it's octopodes, the -pus becoming -podes in the plural as foot to feet
joeconway 4y ago
Also this https://www.scribd.com/book/317091083/The-Soul-of-an-Octopus-A-Surprising-Exploration-into-the-Wonder-of-Consciousness https://www.scribd.com/book/317091083/The-Soul-of-an-Octopus...
jtchang 4y ago
Actually you are slightly wrong (but only if you are british). Per the merriam webster editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s166nC_hiZ0&ab_channel=Sebasti%C3%A1nFigueroa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s166nC_hiZ0&ab_channel=Sebas...
the__alchemist 4y ago
See Also: Children of Ruin.
smeagull 4y ago
For pedants it's octopodes because its a Greek root, but the sort of people who think that way are the worst and are responsible for screwing up English a lot, so fuck those nerds. If you're speaking English then you just add an s or es. So Octopuses is right.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Yes yes I know that it's not a Latin word. It came into English from scientific (not classical) latin, so it kind of is.
poglet 4y ago
The Kindle version of the book is currently free for Prime users.
bearmode 4y ago
Octopuses, octopodes, and octopi are all prefectly valid in modern English. There is an argument to be made that we should respect the greek root, but Octopi has been used for so long that it is a modern English word
martopix 4y ago
As a person who studied both latin and ancient greek in high school, Octopi makes my eyes bleed.
rvilj 4y ago
[dead]

bananarchist 4y ago

No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)

mc32 4y ago
I always thought it was virus and virus given its root.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  All the attested uses of the word virus in Latin are only in the singular number. Nevertheless, the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora (time => times) or corpus => corpora (body => bodies), or perhaps "virera", like pondus => pondera (weight => weights) or genus => genera (kind => kinds), depending on the original quality of the final vowel in the stem. (Originally it would have been visos => visosa, but the final vowel in virus has become closed, while the intervocalic s has become r due to rhotacism.) You have been thinking at the masculine words whose stem ends in -u, like fructu (fruit), where the singular is fructus and the plural is fructuus. There -s is not part of the stem but it is a marker of the singular masculine nominative case. In virus and the other neuter nouns that end in -s, the -s is a part of the stem of the word, not a case marker. There are also masculine word where the stem ends in -s, like muus (mouse), in which the -s must also not be confused with the marker of the nominative case that is applied to some of the words with other kinds of stems.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    > the correct plural would have been "virora", like tempus => tempora This would be true if virus were a third declension noun. It it is second declension noun. Its genitive is viri, not viroris.
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      It is true that there are a few cases of a word "viri", which might have been the genitive of "virus". Nevertheless, the meaning of the word is not certain, at least in the examples that I have seen. Even if the word "viri" was really intended as the genitive of "virus", that is just another example of many cases when even the native speakers of Latin were not certain about the gender and declination class of certain seldom used words. Whoever has used "viri" as the genitive of "virus" was believing that it is a masculine word of the 2nd declension. Most attested uses of virus are consistent with it being a neuter of the 3rd declension (i.e. "virus" was used for the accusative case). The word virus cannot be a neuter of the 2nd declension (in that case it would have been "virum"). Actually it is possible that in very old Latin the word virus was indeed a masculine of the 2nd declension, like its cognate word in Greek, but due to its meaning as a name of a substance it was transferred to the neuter gender in the 3rd declension. Such interconversions of the words ending in -us between 2nd declension masculine, 3rd declension neuter and 4th declension masculine have happened for many words during the history of the Latin language, because even some native speakers guessed wrong the word class after hearing a rare word just a few times, and then others imitated them.
      - DFHippie 4y ago
        That all makes sense. What I know of virus is all from books like Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar, which is basically a 19th century understanding: languages have particular rules one can enumerate and deviations from these rules are errors.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        That understanding is basically correct. But the history of Latin is quite long, and the rules change over time.
daveslash 4y ago
It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish. I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are or are not the same species, whereas 'octopodes' deliberately speaks across speciation? I dunno... I'm just spit-balling here. I probably should have done more research before commenting. Downvote if I'm way off base. :)
- colechristensen 4y ago
  There’s no right way. Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling anyone there’s a right way because there isn’t. It’s a greek, latin, and english word, but also none of them. No usage is standard or ultimately correct.
  - cnelsenmilt 4y ago
    Personally I've always preferred to muddy the waters by treating it as a fourth-declension noun, so that its plural would be octopūs.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold. so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive! Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is) Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no trailing s), so a group from a single species Octopodes then could explicitly refer to multiple species together, as it changes the spelling a bit and also adds an s Of course, conventions are not decided upon by a single persons thought process in a random internet forum - so I'm not sure why I wrote this out
DFHippie 4y ago
Virus is the only neuter second declension Latin noun in -us (as opposed to -um). It means "poison" in Latin. I assume this was all meant tongue-in-cheek, but in case anyone is curious, the Latin plural is not virodes. All of this is recalled from my high school Latin, which was a long time ago.
annyeonghada 4y ago
In latin the word virus does not have an attested plural[1] but if we model it from the other neuter nouns of the second declension it would be "vira". [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Declension_4 The plural of surplus is surpluses[2]. It would be *surplures/surplura in latin, so it is an English/French original. It doesn't make sense from an historical linguistic perspective to have a stem in dental "d" when in latin was in liquid "r": plus, pluris[3]. [2]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surplus#Noun [3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plus#Declension Cactus is a masculine name from the second declension: its latin plural is "cactī"[4]. Again, it would be unexplainable how that stem in dental would appear in a second declension name (stem in "o"). [4]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cactus#Latin Octopus is right, given that it's a third declension name with a dental stem.[5] [5]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Latin
- bananarchist 4y ago
  Your surplodes of evidence will never sway me and my linguistodes degree
  - euroderf 4y ago
    I tried to pursue this topic to the antipodes but I only found an antipus.
cph123 4y ago
I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  It’s 6th for me, and no adverts. How does this get monetised?
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Something something pr0n
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Paige, no!
- ant6n 4y ago
  7th result on the first page? Sounds like an authoritative source to me!
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Google it a few more times, google will start feeding it back to people who will also google it in disbelief; two years from now they're using it in NYT headlines.
- knaekhoved 4y ago
  Impressive indexing speed.
  - KMag 4y ago
    If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP rate limiting, don't re-check any page for updates too often, don't wait a crazy long time before re-checking any page, etc.), it was a bunch of arcane black magic heuristics to schedule pages for crawling. These days, I imagine they have one ML model for the expected time until a given page shows up on the first page of search results for some query, another ML model for guessing how much the page has changed (cosine distance of some semantic embedding or something), and schedule based on the product of the two estimates. It's still probably lots of black magic heuristics, just now it's probably heuristics nobody can read.
bmitc 4y ago
Either is fine. Octopuses or octopodes. The latter is the technical answer, but the former is acceptable and probably even more common. Although it is based on a Greek word, English isn’t Greek.
staplung 4y ago
The correct form is to sum up the legs involved. So two of the eight-legged creatures whose plural is in doubt would be hexadecapods. And if you have an octopus eating a kangaroo you'd then have a decapod, and so on.
lalos 4y ago
what is the plural for campus?
- tokai 4y ago
  >The Latinate plural form campi is sometimes used, particularly with respect to colleges or universities; however, it is sometimes frowned upon. By contrast, the common plural form campuses is universally accepted. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/campus#Etymology
jl6 4y ago
abacus->abacodes nautilus->nautilodes anus->anodes ?!
barrenko 4y ago
Isn't it virii (joke)?
nerdponx 4y ago
Not so fast. "virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English. "surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". I admit that "superplodes" is pretty fun to say.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura". What's irregular about that?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Well, nothing technically, from what Latin I remember. I meant it in the not-technical sense that the nominative form is different from the word stem and it looks superficially like a standard 1st/2nd declension adjective.
smeagull 4y ago
Actually we're speaking English, and not Greek or Latin, so we add an 's' or 'es'. Just because some English professor assholes wanted to show off their knowledge of foreign languages in the 17-19th centuries, doesn't mean we should follow those rules now. They are responsible for a lot of the confusion and horrible English rules that users of English now have to deal with. I say shit on their horrible legacy.

dharmab 4y ago

If you want to get really pedantic, use Octopodes :)

CoastalCoder 4y ago
> If you want to get really pedantic Well that certainly got our attention. Please, continue.
- GravitasFailure 4y ago
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plurals-of-octopus-octopi-octopuses-octopodes https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura... The full thing is worth a read, but when you steal a word from one language that it also stole from a third, the pluralization rules are pretty much anything goes.
pvaldes 4y ago
Octopoda is the order, better not mix both terms
- euroderf 4y ago
  Is this a niche where I could use "octopodibus" ?

mc32 4y ago

English plural vs Latin vs Greek. Since its origin is Greek I’d take the anglicized plural or the original plural over the superimposed Latin plural which makes absolutely no sense to me.

Telemakhos 4y ago
In ancient Greek πολύπους (polypus) is the more common and generic term, ὀκτάπους (octapus) the term for the animal, and ὀκτόπους (octopus) a possible synonym that seems to be used more often for the scorpion (which also has eight legs) or as an adjective for anything that is eight feet long or of eight square feet in size. Really, the English should be "octapus" or "polypus," and curmudgeons who want to feel superior to hoi illiterati polloi should cherish this treasure of pointless trivia.

stevenwoo 4y ago

some recent speculative sci-fi on same subject, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler set in near future Vietnam.

pacaro 4y ago

Or you can choose not to use the inflectional morphology of another language on a loanword. Especially in a case like octopus where it (arguably) isn't a loanword

LightG 4y ago

Octopussies, natch.

mike10921 4y ago

If someone at a party complained to me that octopuses is wrong and it should be octopi, I would most likely be moving on to the next table..

space_ghost 4y ago
And I would happily jump in your vacant seat and enjoy hours of pedantic discussions on the vagaries of silly English words.
- dmichulke 4y ago
  Pro tip: invite him for for pizzae
  - flyingfences 4y ago
    Dialectically, "pizza" is an uncountable and "pie(s)" is the unit.
    - harshbutfair 4y ago
      In Australia we would never refer to pizzas as pies. Is this a US-only thing or does it happen elsewhere?
      - OJFord 4y ago
        It's American to my British ear. I think they sometimes distinguish 'pizza pie' as being the deeper-pan Chicagoan style, which to be fair is a lot more like what I would call a pie than what I would call a pizza. (But also not really either.)
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        "Pies" is most certainly not American. I have heard that it is supposedly specific to New York, but if you watch Friends (set in New York), you'll see frequent references to the Joey Special, "two pizzas". It's always possible that there are zero people who think of "pies" as an appropriate way to refer to pizzas, but the myth persists that weird foreign people do it. People will believe anything about weird foreigners. Or there might be weird foreign people doing it right now. It's hard to know.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

The plural spelling is whatever plural people generally use. Why wouldn't it be?

pmb_ 4y ago

I'd have to give an anti-recommendation to this book. The author never explains his thesis and the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods. He spends very little time drawing connections to consciousness or speaking about what octopus life can tell us about consciousness. There is a whole chapter where he talks about the influence of language in human action (like self-talk), and then ends the chapter by with something like "and octopuses don't have this ability". What was the point of that whole chapter then? Maybe my expectations were miscalibrated, and I thought he would spend more time drawing connections between octopuses and humans, and what those similarities could tell us about consciousness. Instead of that, the writing about consciousness in this book is quite shallow.

xcambar 4y ago
Is there a book or resource you would recommend then?
- pmb_ 4y ago
  If you're just curious about octopuses, I think you can probably learn much more in much less time by doing your own research and finding articles like this. If you're more interested in consciousness a good place to start is "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" by Annaka Harris.
comboy 4y ago
Same. I had huge expectations. Basically what you learn is that octopuses are intelligent and for a long time we didn't realize because they are smart enough to know they are in custody when we catch them and they're pretty social. I mean, it's OK, but the whole book feels a bit like a preface to the thing which never came.
JadeNB 4y ago
> the book reads like his thesis was "Octopuses are cool" and spends the entire time listing fun facts and interesting stories about his interactions with cephalopods. That sounds like a recommendation to me!

kennend3 4y ago

The Octopus is my favourite animal (second is the Camel). For others who may find them interesting check out "My Octopus Teacher"

thenoblesquid 4y ago
Definitely checking that out. I've stopped eating Octopus. They are just on another level.

867-5309 4y ago

IIRC on QI they said it's octopodes, the -pus becoming -podes in the plural as foot to feet

joeconway 4y ago

Also this https://www.scribd.com/book/317091083/The-Soul-of-an-Octopus-A-Surprising-Exploration-into-the-Wonder-of-Consciousness https://www.scribd.com/book/317091083/The-Soul-of-an-Octopus...

jtchang 4y ago

Actually you are slightly wrong (but only if you are british). Per the merriam webster editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s166nC_hiZ0&ab_channel=Sebasti%C3%A1nFigueroa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s166nC_hiZ0&ab_channel=Sebas...

the__alchemist 4y ago